Last year’s season of Sesame Street was a rough one for Cookie Monster.

For its 44th year, the show dedicated itself to teaching its young viewers about executive functioning, an umbrella term for cognitive skills like attention to detail, strategizing, and other mental processes that connect past experiences to present decision-making—including self-control, an idea easily demonstrated by making a junk-food junkie wait for his sugar fix.

And wait he did. In a recurring segment called “Cookie’s Crumby Pictures,” the show’s writers spoofed the plots of made-for-adult movies to create sketches with names like “The Hungry Games” and “The Spy Who Loved Cookies,” each featuring some outlandish reason why the chronically hungry Muppet had to hold on before chowing down.

The target audience of Sesame Street skews toward preschoolers—the show is geared toward kids between the ages of three and five—but new research suggests that children may have a handle on executive functioning, including the concept of self-control, much earlier than previously thought.

In a study of 150 15-month-olds recently published in the journal Cognitive Development, babies watched as an adult demonstrated how to use different noise-making toys, like a box with a buzzer and a set of plastic beads that could be dropped into a cup. The demonstration was then repeated as a second adult (referred to in the study as “the emoter”) came in the room and angrily berated the first one for making too much noise. Afterwards, the babies had a chance to play with the toys; in half of the cases, the angry adult either left the room or turned away from the babies, and in the other half stood facing them with a neutral expression.

"Even though the babies can’t use words to describe the event, they’re watching this interaction and calculating the right thing to do."

Babies in the former group reached for the toys without hesitation, but under the gaze of the formerly angry adult, the majority of those in the latter group waited a few seconds, on average, before picking them up. When they did, they were less likely to play with them in the same way as they had been shown, indicating that they were adjusting (or at least trying to adjust) their actions in order to avoid becoming the target of the emoter’s wrath.

“They want to pick up the object, they want to imitate the interesting act that the adult is doing. That’s what their impulses are telling them to do. But if they can use executive function to regulate their emotional behavior, they can resist that impulse,” said study co-author Andrew Meltzoff, a psychology professor at the University of Washington and co-director of its Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

While the ability to recognize emotions can develop as early as four months of age, past research has tended to focus on emotions directed at the babies themselves, rather than on their ability to successfully read exchanges between others, or what Meltzoff terms “emotional eavesdropping.” But in this case, he says, the majority of the babies were able to successfully apply what they learned through such eavesdropping (making noise with the toys made the adult angry) to their own situations (if they did it, the adult would yell at them, too).

“Nobody was angry at them. The emoter was angry at the other adult, and the baby is having a very sophisticated social calculation,” Meltzoff says, adding that the study runs contrary to common wisdom that executive functioning may be largely contingent on language abilities. “Even though the babies can’t talk to you and can’t use words to describe the event, they’re watching this social emotional interaction and they’re sort of calculating the right thing to do in this setting … They have this very rich mental life about emotions, even though they’re too young to talk about it.”

Now that the original subjects from the study are now all preschool-aged, Meltzoff and his colleagues plan to follow up with them to assess how their self-control abilities as young children relate to what they demonstrated as babies.

“We’re predicting that we’ll find a relationship between what they do at 15 months and five years,” he says, and “preliminary data is suggesting that that’s the case.” No word on how that might shake out at 44 years, but for the curious, the hungry blue Muppet struggling through “Life of Whoopie Pie” might offer a couple clues.

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Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal Trump his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.

President Trump raged at his TV on Sunday morning. And yet on balance, he had a pretty good weekend. He got a measure of revenge upon the hated FBI, firing former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe two days before his pension vested. He successfully coerced his balky attorney general, Jeff Sessions, into speeding up the FBI’s processes to enable the firing before McCabe’s retirement date.

Beyond this vindictive fun for the president, he achieved something politically important. The Trump administration is offering a not very convincing story about the McCabe firing. It is insisting that the decision was taken internally by the Department of Justice, and that the president’s repeated and emphatic demands—public and private—had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the bathroom. So let me say, as someone who recently returned from China, that you should be prepared to one, carry your own toilet paper and two, practice your squat.

I do not mean those goofy chairless sits you see at the gym. No, toned glutes will not save you here. I mean the deep squat, where you plop your butt down as far as it can go while staying aloft and balanced on the heels. This position—in contrast to deep squatting on your toes as most Americans naturally attempt instead—is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours ...

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Last May, TheWashington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.

She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.

As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.

Here is something that, even on its own, is astonishing: The president of the United States demanded the firing of the former FBI deputy director, a career civil servant, after tormenting him both publicly and privately—and it worked.

The American public still doesn’t know in any detail what Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed late Friday night, is supposed to have done. But citizens can see exactly what Donald Trump did to McCabe. And the president’s actions are corroding the independence that a healthy constitutional democracy needs in its law enforcement and intelligence apparatus.

McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them.

On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Timesdropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardianand The Intercept about the possible problem.

The details could seem Byzantine. Aleksandr Kogan, then a Cambridge academic, founded a company, Global Science Research, and immediately took on a major client, Strategic Communication Laboratories, which eventually gave birth to Cambridge Analytica. (Steve Bannon, an adviser to the company and a former senior adviser to Trump, reportedly picked the name.)

Although the former secretary of state’s contentious relationship with the president didn’t help matters, Tillerson’s management style left a department in disarray.

Rex Tillerson is hardly the first person to be targeted in a tweet from Donald Trump, but on Tuesday morning, he became the first Cabinet official to be fired by one. It was an ignominious end to Tillerson’s 13-month stint as secretary of state, a tenure that would have been undistinguished if it weren’t so entirely destructive.

Compared with expectations for other members of Trump’s Cabinet, the disastrous results of Tillerson’s time in office are somewhat surprising. Unlike the EPA’s Scott Pruitt, Tillerson did not have obvious antipathy for the department he headed; unlike HUD’s Ben Carson, he had professional experience that was relevant to the job; and unlike Education’s Betsy DeVos, his confirmation hearing wasn't a disaster.

A new six-part Netflix documentary is a stunning dive into a utopian religious community in Oregon that descended into darkness.

To describe Wild Wild Country as jaw-dropping is to understate the number of times my mouth gaped while watching the series, a six-part Netflix documentary about a religious community in Oregon in the 1980s. It’s ostensibly the story of how a group led by the dynamic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh purchased 64,000 acres of land in central Oregon in a bid to build its own utopian city. But, as the series immediately reveals, the narrative becomes darker and stranger than you might ever imagine. It’s a tale that mines the weirdness of the counterculture in the ’70s and ’80s, the age-old conflict between rural Americans and free love–preaching cityfolk, and the emotional vacuum that compels people to interpret a bearded mystic as something akin to a god.

It’s not that they can’t consider other people’s perspectives. It’s that they don’t do so automatically.

It’s a rare person who goes out of their way to spend time with psychopaths, and a rarer one still who repeatedly calls a prison to do so. But after more than a year of meetings and negotiation, Arielle Baskin-Sommers from Yale University finally persuaded a maximum-security prison in Connecticut to let her work with their inmates, and to study those with psychopathic tendencies.

Psychopaths, by definition, have problems understanding the emotions of other people, which partly explains why they are so selfish, why they so callously disregard the welfare of others, and why they commit violent crimes at up to three times the rate of other people.

But curiously, they seem to have no difficulty in understanding what other people think, want, or believe—the skill variously known as perspective-taking, mentalizing, or theory of mind. “Their behavior seems to suggest that they don’t consider the thoughts of others,” says Baskin-Sommers, but their performance on experiments suggests otherwise. When they hear a story and are asked to explicitly say what a character is thinking, they can.